Switching from a mail client to GMail

I have been kicking around the idea of ditching my mail client ever since Sparrow was bought out by Google. I discovered PostBox which worked great for a while but seemed to be bloated and slow after using it for a while. I then came across AirMail which is a great replacement for Sparrow but recent updates seemed to have slowed it down, and also based on some of the open discussion about where its going it sounds like it also is going to get bloated and eventually be a slow client. Maybe once things are a little more set in stone and its not so Beta I might have to look at it again.

So after much debating I took the plunge, I consolidated all of my mail accounts into one account within GMail. Its only been two days so far using GMail via the browser and it hasn’t been too bad…

In order to get GMail to be part of my normal work flow I had to make some changes to my system. First I made so that all mailto: links on pages in Chrome will now open GMail instead of the mail client. In order to do this simply load up GMail and then paste the following line of code into the address bar and hit enter

I also installed the Attachments.me Chrome extension so that I can continue to use Dropbox for email attachments, as well as allowing me to save attachments directly to my Dropbox when needed. Interested to see how long I can last with out an email client, I am sure future updates will follow.